


What are these, so wither'd and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, and yet are on't?

by a_walking_shadow



Series: A stained glass variation of the truth [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-04 23:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16799536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: Petunia always saw more than she was supposed to. More than anyone was supposed to, really.Everyone else loved Lily Evans. Petunia loved her sister, too, but that was in spite of what she was, not because of it.(There is something distinctly inhuman about witches and wizards, and no one seems to notice, not even the witches and wizards themselves. No one sees, except Petunia Evans does.)





	What are these, so wither'd and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, and yet are on't?

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing you recognise, unfortunately. The title is taken from Act I Scene III of Macbeth.

The girl who was called Lily Evans whispered _love me love me love me_ and everyone did. Drew them in like moths to a flame, all open smiles and boundless energy, and it was far too late by the time they noticed those too sharp canines, and the crackling flames under her skin, and the flicker of wings just out of sight.  
Her parents loved her, because obviously they were supposed to love their daughter. And if they found themselves paying her more attention than her sister, well, clearly the newborn needed an extra set of eyes, and she was such an energetic child.  
Her sister didn’t, because sometimes children see things clearer and Petunia always did have eyes like a hawk. And that Snape boy…

Where Lily was fire, Severus was ice. Where she had wings, feathered and angel-like but still burning, he had knives, delicate-looking things hidden behind jagged blades catching on anything and anyone that got close. Eyes like black ice, blank nothingness tearing the world out from the unsuspecting. Poison oozing out of every pore.  
Beside him, Lily’s fire looked positively tame.

When Lily had her eleventh birthday, a man turned up on the doorstep. A man with eyes twinkling like stars and a voice like honey, but with the bitter undertone of citrus. No, not citrus. The lemon went with the honey, part of the sweetness. The bitter was something else. Acid. Cyanide. Petunia only caught the taste of it for a moment, but a moment was enough. Her parents were trapped like flies. Flies to honey like moths to a flame. Petunia had no idea why she, alone, never got caught, and she had no idea if it was a blessing or a curse.

He invited her to a school called Hogwarts, and Lily said it was like a fairy tale.  
No, Petunia thought, this is a horror story and you’re the monster and I don’t think you even know.

She asked to go along, because Lily may have been something other but she was still her baby sister. Petunia had read to her, and sat with her while she cried, and pushed her on the swings, and hidden her horror as best as she could when Lily jumped off of those very same swings, and Petunia caught a glimpse of at least half a dozen sets of wings, bearing her aloft. She had hosted tea parties, and sewed up torn dresses, and tried and failed to convince her that it had been the Snape boys’ claws responsible for the broken stitches. Lily may have been theirs- of that there was no doubt- but she belonged to Petunia, too.

The man said no, in a letter practically dripping with honey, and Petunia tried hard not to admit how relieved she was. She dropped the letter in the bin, washed her hands, and refused to eat sugar for a week, unable to lose the lingering sweetness. Her parents- and Lily- talked about how nice the old man was, how lovely, how sweet. Petunia thought of medicine, sugar-coated to make it go down better, and she thought of the poison seeping out of the Snape boy’s skin, and the flash of bitterness she caught off of the man, and she forced herself to remain quiet.  
This is a curse, she decides. She is Cassandra. The true seer, no matter what Lily’s new schoolbooks say. Petunia is the one who sees the truth, but she is cursed to have no one believe her.

Lily and Petunia stand on a platform at a train station. Lily looks and sees trunks, owls, wands, robes. Petunia looks and sees birds with the eyes of predators staring back. Robes, all the better for hiding tentacles. Wings and claws and pincers and far too many eyes- never all at once, never properly seen, not even always there. (She thinks, sometimes, that if she was like Lily, then she would be nothing but eyes.)  
They have their first fight. The first one that matters, at any rate, the first one where Lily’s whispering mind goes from _love me love me love me_ to _leave me alone_. The Snape boy stares out of pitch-black orbs, and on the edge of this reality and the beginning of the next, she sees a curved blade flicker into a crude imitation of a smile.

Lily only writes rarely, and almost never to Petunia. Her parents gush over the news, pinning fragments of Lily’s life to the fridge like a badge of honour. Their eyes ghost over them, never really seeing. Never understanding.  
At some point, Petunia realises.  
They never stare into the shadows.  
From that day on, her gaze darts into the darkest corners of every room she enters, then she checks the shadow of every person in it, and only then does she dare to meet their eyes.

Lily joins a war, because she is all fire and what better use for the flames? Her rare letters and even rarer phone calls revolve around the fight, around “the Order” but mostly around “James”. Not once does Petunia see mention of a Severus. She does not know if this is a good thing, for while Snape may have been poison, at least he was one Petunia understood.  
Petunia becomes a secretary, because she has a good eye for detail, the way her eyes dart all over the place like that. She meets Vernon Dursley, a man whose shadow always matches his body, who never stares into shadows and never notices that she does. One day, she sees him come in and she meets his eyes before checking his shadow, and realises that she’s never known anyone else she didn’t check, not even her parents. Not since Lily was born.  
They get engaged, then married. Lily is not invited to the wedding, which upsets her, and the stovetop spits flames at Petunia when she tries to cook dinner the evening Lily finds out. Vernon mutters curses about the gas company, and Petunia smiles a terrified smile and suggests they get fish and chips for the evening.  
Even so, when Lily marries James, Petunia doesn’t feel safe turning down the wedding invite that turns up, tied to the leg of a bird with the fierce eyes of a seasoned predator. That means telling Vernon about her sister, of course.

They meet James and Lily at a posh restaurant a few weeks before the event. Petunia watches the couple, watches their shadows. Lily is the same as always, although Petunia has a terrible suspicion that her hands are clawed now, and her fire seems to be burning even brighter. James…  
She catches only fragments. She always does, even when watching her sister, and it is only through years of experience that she knows what to look for in Lily. But there are horns hidden in the artfully tousled mess of hair on his head. He laughs at something Lily says and it comes out as more of a hiss, forked tongue flickering for just a moment. Grabs her sister’s hand and she thinks she sees tentacles instead of an arm. Kisses her hard enough to leave bruises and Petunia finds herself thinking of an octopus leaving rings on its prey instead of a man.  
Lily doesn’t whisper _love me_ anymore. (It wasn’t ever a whisper, nothing verbal, nothing as obvious. Something insidious, creeping into your head, a belief, a plea, a promise, a threat.) Instead, she hisses _mine, mine, mine_ and Petunia knows that James couldn’t want anyone else, not with Lily claiming him.  
James is less of an order, more of an idea. Laughter on the wind. Carefree laughter, getting crueller and crueller and crueller as Vernon angers him more and more. Petunia finds herself frozen, terrified, waiting for her husband to suffer at the hands of the demon he has just angered.  
Somehow, they get out alive. Vernon doesn’t even realise what was wrong.  
They do not go the wedding.

Petunia Dursley goes about her days. She has a son, called Dudley, who is delightfully ordinary. She watched him sleep, night after night, dreading the moment when his shadow will shift. She sees it in her nightmares, her darling boy with sparkling blue eyes, watching as the blue envelops the world and she starts to drown in the ocean he creates, feels the ghostly touch of spider legs as he scuttles around her ankles. But that is all it is- a ghost of something half-remembered from her own childhood. Dudley is normal. Dudley is safe. Dudley will not abandon her.

On the 1st of November 1981, Petunia Dursley wakes up next to her perfectly ordinary husband. She climbs out of her perfectly ordinary bed and goes next door to check on her perfectly ordinary son. Walks downstairs in her perfectly ordinary house and doesn’t feel the need to peer into any of the corners, even in the half-light of the morning, because she is safe and all the shadows will be as they are supposed to be, here.  
She goes to collect the milk.  
She registers the other before she realises what it actually is. Raven feathers sticking up at odd angles. A tiny, blanket-wrapped shape that shifts even in sleep, shifts in ways that so obviously scream inhumanity. Flies, she thinks. Knows. Flies, thousands of them, gathered into a shape roughly approximating that of a human, and are they covering the surface of something dead or are they everything there is?  
A moment later, the image resolves itself into a baby with messy black hair, swaddled in a blanket and clutching a letter with her name on it. There is a cut on its forehead in the shape of a lightning bolt, and even in this shape the mark reminds her of the seeping poison of the Snape boy at his worst.  
Petunia screams.  
Green eyes stare up at her. _Take me, take me, take me, please please please_ \- she knows that voice. That feeling, crawling into her head, making her want to obey.  
Petunia knows that voice, just as well as she knows those eyes. Better than she knows the bitter undertones to the honey that coats the letter in his tiny hands.  
She knows what this means.

My sister was an Icarus, she thinks. Her wings have been burning since the moment she was born, and she never truly believed she would ever hit the ground.


End file.
